In Europe (94 page)

At the same time, the young rebels also felt a great ambivalence towards the wave of prosperity. The real hippies were those who chose to drop out of society altogether. They attached great importance to the naturalness of clothing, food and lifestyle: unbleached cotton, bare feet, macro-biotic diets, meditation, rest. Cities were artificial, and therefore wrong. The ideal was a peaceful, communal existence in the countryside – where, by the way, most of these urban children lasted no more than six months. ‘In Holland as well, more and more right-thinking young people are getting out,’
Hitweek
wrote in 1969. ‘They're starting a new, radiant life that the world they come from doesn't understand at all.’

There was also a fifth force, deeply hidden, which propelled this storm to great heights: fear. Much of the thinking of that day exudes an intense nineteenth-century optimism, the conviction that one could make one's own ‘radiant’ life. Yet it is also impossible to understand the 1960s without understanding the existential fear that held many Europeans in its grip. The whole generation of the 1960s had been raised under the permanent threat of a new war, many saw the atom bomb as an immediate threat, many young people wanted to ban war and oppression from the world at any cost.

Early in October 1967, newspapers all over the world ran the famous melancholy portrait of rebel leader Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. He had been killed in the jungles of Bolivia, and that was the moment his myth came to life. His image was carried in demonstrations, it hung everywhere in cafés and students’ rooms, it symbolised a new solidarity with the Third World. With increasing frequency, publications like
Provo
,
Salut les Copains
,
ABC
,
Konkret
, the British
Oz
and the Italian
Mondo Beat
dealt with the burning
questions of the day: the relations between rich and poor, the ethical aspects of technology, the exploitation of the planet, the limits to growth.

Just as the Spanish Civil War had set the tone in the 1930s, the American intervention in Vietnam was the touchstone for the 1960s. In early 1968, more than half a million American soldiers were involved in that dirty and unwinnable conflict, a war which could also be seen on TV every day. One demonstration after another rolled through the capitals of Western Europe and America. Tens of thousands of young American men refused the draft.

Within the ‘islands of young people’, Marxism and Maoism often served as anti-ideologies, radical ways to distance oneself from the charged past of older generations. Both constituted attractive methods to press modern society into a mould that was easy to grasp, and also the ideal weapon to provoke and oppose the anti-communist establishment. ‘Real’ workers – as long as they fitted within that theoretical framework – were cherished by the young rebels. Parisian students embraced the Renault workers from Flins. My acquaintances in Amsterdam adopted working-class accents. Joschka Fischer, who would become Germany's foreign minister, went to work on the production line at Opel in 1970 in order to ‘live alongside the workers’. No one wanted anything more to do with the bourgeoisie.

In hindsight, the statistics show where the real rebellion took place: in 1965, more than half of all Dutch people felt that children should not call their parents by their first name, and more than eighty per cent felt that mothers should not work outside the home. In less than five years, these percentages had been halved. The real revolution of the 1960s took place indoors, at hundreds of thousands of kitchen tables.

THE DIVIDING LINE BETWEEN FLOWER POWER AND THE SOBERING
1970s lay somewhere around 1968. With increasing frequency, the troubadours interspersed their cheerful songs with grim, bitter lyrics. The Rolling Stones sang the praises of the ‘Street Fighting Man’, Jefferson Airplane openly summoned ‘Volunteers’ to join the revolution: ‘One generation got old,/One generation got soul,/This generation got no destination to hold,/Pick up the cry!’ Both songs were banned by numerous radio stations.

The cultural movements may have been international, but the concrete and often inevitable conflicts that resulted from them were – with the exception of the opposition to the war in Vietnam – largely national by nature. Provo was typically Dutch, Mary Quant was English, Rudi Dutschke was German to a tee, and May 1968 was eminently French.

The British, who had not been occupied by a hostile army and had experienced less of a crisis and fewer jolts to their prosperity than other Europeans, were those least affected by the generation gap. Young people particularly had a bone to pick with the ‘British’ way of life, which had ground to a halt somewhere in the 1920s: the fashion, the music, the censorship and the laws governing morality.

In Poland – for there too a small student rebellion was underway in 1968 – the major issue was freedom: when the staging of a nineteenth-century drama at Warsaw's national theatre was banned, a group of angry students marched into the censor's office. Fifty of them were arrested, and their leaders, Adam Michnik and Henryk Szlaifer, were expelled from university. In the disturbances which followed, some 50,000 students took part. A number of sympathisers on the faculty were sacked, including Zygmunt Bauman, who was later to achieve fame across Europe. The
official reason for his dismissal was that he had been ‘influenced by American sociology’.

In France, the oppression exercised by the old bourgeois society was felt most keenly in regard to the educational system and police violence. ‘We are fighting because we do not want to make a career as scientists whose research work will serve only a profit-based economy,’ read a student brochure handed out at Nanterre. ‘We decline the examinations and the honorary titles used to reward those [few] who are willing to accept the system.’

In Italy the focus was on corruption and public scandals, as well as education and police violence. Between 1960–8 the Italian student population had doubled, while the universities had seen little in the way of change since the nineteenth century. ‘Never have I met an Italian student who felt he had received a good education,’ George Armstrong wrote in the
New Statesman
in 1968. ‘The universities are the rigid feudal domain of the older professors. They are the haven of the sons and daughters of the middle classes, who usually have no intention of working in the field for which they have been trained.’ In Rome, 300 professors were charged with teaching more than 60,000 students.

In the Netherlands, as in Britain, the revolution of the 1960s was a largely playful one. The student movement was a serious affair, but Provo and its adherents never stopped playing: with public opinion, with the medium of television, with the ‘public image’. It was an artistic form of protest linked to anti-monarchist and anti-German sentiments (made manifest during the wedding of Crown Princess Beatrix and Claus von Amsberg in March 1966), anti-bourgeois ideals (expressed in the happenings around the
Lieverdje
and elsewhere) and a kind of anti-fascism-in-hindsight (with the storming of the daily newspaper
De Telegraaf
in June 1966).

In Germany, that playfulness was nowhere to be found. There things revolved, in essence, around the legacy of the Second World War.

In 1968, the American philosopher Joseph Berke visited Commune 1 at Stephanstrasse 60 in Berlin. Arriving at 6 p.m., he found the entire community still fast asleep. The two televisions in the building were on all the time, albeit with the volume turned down. When the communards finally
left their beds, they sat staring at the screens in silence. In his report, Berke said they were all high, despite their initial rejection of drugs as a ‘bourgeois distraction from the political revolution’.

Commune I had been set up in March 1967 by Fritz Teufel. Teufel's notoriety began after he broke into the dean's office at the Freie Universität, took his cigars, toga and chain of office, then rode a bicycle through the corridors to the auditorium, where he allowed the cheering student body to appoint him the school's new dean. His first official act was to sack all of the unpopular professors. Teufel spent more time in jail than outside it. In imitation of the Dutch Provos, his Commune 1 used constant provocations to lure ‘the system’ into betraying its ‘true nature’ as aggressive, repressive and capitalistic.

A former Amsterdam activist once told me how shocked he had been by the violent character of the Berlin demonstrations. Provo toted cap guns, carried banners with nothing written on them, but the members of Commune I had no such sense of humour. ‘In Holland, a nod was sufficient, as long as you observed a few rules. But in Berlin, that disciplined marching back and forth and then standing to attention … We thought it was scary, it wasn't our kind of thing.’

When Rudi Dutschke, who lived in the commune for a time, refused to abandon the ‘bourgeois private relationship’ with ‘his’ Gretchen, the group took a vote and decided to go into collective psychoanalysis. Klaus Röhl, husband of the journalist Ulrike Meinhof and editor-in-chief of
Konkret
, said the commune seemed to him to be a group of neglected, over-privileged adolescents who had been given ‘too much pocket money and too little human affection’.

‘They lived,’ he said, ‘like Russian revolutionaries in the winter of 1917–18, wearing leather jackets and grubby trousers which they didn't bother to remove when they lay down to sleep somewhere. They ate and slept irregularly, sent their children to school irregularly, and only attended the university in order to hand out pamphlets and shout manifestos through their megaphones. When – despite this detailed replication of decor and lifestyle – the revolution failed to materialise, when it turned out (as Dutschke had predicted long before) that there was no way to avoid the long, grinding and rather unromantic march through the halls of the established order, they became disillusioned.’

In spring 1967, 300 people were killed in a fire in a Brussels department store. Soon afterwards, Fritz Teufel and his fellow communards Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin began handing out pamphlets in which responsibility for the fire was attributed to Belgian ‘cells’ who actively opposed the war in Vietnam, and suggesting that their example might very well be followed in Germany. ‘300 fattened citizens and their exciting lives were snuffed out, and Brussels became Hanoi.’

Teufel and an accomplice were arrested for inciting arson. That summer, during a violent demonstration against a visit to Germany by the Shah of Persia – ‘The new Hitler!’ – a student, Benno Ohnesorg, was killed by a police bullet. A few months later Dutschke was gunned down by a neo-Nazi. Students all over the country took to the streets by the hundreds of thousands.

In April 1968, Baader and Ensslin made their first real attempt at burning down the Schneider department store in Munich. During their trial that October, rioting broke out. About 400 sympathisers were arrested. The demonstrators chanted: ‘What is civilisation? Is it a Mercedes? A nice house? Is it a soothed conscience? I ask you again, comrades, what is civilisation?’

In late 1968, Ralph Blumenthal of the
New York Times
visited Commune 1 and found only one female member and a couple of men still living there. Ulrich Enzensberger, brother of the writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, sat there ‘stoned, examining his painted fingernails’. The last communards lived largely from giving interviews on the subject of revolution and capitalism, and they demanded hefty sums for doing so.

From the early 1970s, Baader, Ensslin, Horst Mahler and others banded together to form the Baader-Meinhof Gang, also known as the Red Army Faction (RAF). The allusion to the Royal Air Force (RAF) was no accident: just as the British had bombed Germany from above, they now planned to raze the ‘new fascism’ from within. In 1970, Baader and Ensslin were helped to escape from prison by a group of friends led by Ulrike Meinhof. According to those involved, it was a purely impulsive action: there was no well-organised network of safe houses or hiding places, no longer-term ‘urban guerrilla’ action had been prepared, the group was almost completely unarmed. Very soon, however, they began receiving support from the Middle East and the DDR – even though the
intensely conventional East German communists had little use for the RAF's tactics. After Baader and Ensslin's escape, the group robbed a number of banks. Bombings of the American army headquarters in Frankfurt, the head offices of the Springer publishing concern (whose newspapers included
Bild-Zeitung
and
Die Welt
) and government buildings in Munich and Karlsruhe followed. Then began a chaotic game of cat and mouse with the authorities. When the presence of Ulrike Meinhof's twin seven-year-old daughters began forming a hindrance to this ‘people's war’, the group decided they should be sent to a camp for Palestinian orphans. ‘Ulrike clung to her children, more than a mother, more like a mother hen,’ her ex-husband wrote. That, in fact, was precisely why Baader and Ensslin demanded that she free herself of this ‘remnant of her bourgeois past’. But El Fatah refused to cooperate: even their Palestinian contact person felt that this was taking things too far. In the end, probably at the insistence of Meinhof herself, the children were handed over to their father.

In early June 1972, Baader and Ensslin were reapprehended. This time, Meinhof was arrested as well. Their followers fought on, increasingly obsessed with the idea of freeing the three ringleaders. On one occasion they met with limited success: in 1975, Peter Lorenz, chairman of the Berlin branch of the CDU, was abducted and exchanged for three RAF prisoners.

In 1976 Meinhof died in her cell, probably – although opinions differ on this score – having committed suicide. Violent demonstrations broke out again; in Frankfurt, Joschka Fischer – at the time a fervent street-fighter – was arrested for ‘attempting to take the life’ of a policeman. Within the next year the group's sympathisers singled out and attacked more than 150 targets, killed German Attorney General Siegfried Buback and bank director Jürgen Ponto, and, in September, kidnapped the foreman of the German employers’ collective, Hanns Martin Schleyer.